courteous

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for courteous is 9 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkɜːti.əs/. Corpus data places it at rank #22,334 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Showing regard or thought for others; especially, displaying good manners or etiquette.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for courteous, with forms such as "ccourteous", "coruteous", and "couretous". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 3 confusable-pair relationships, "Courtois", "courthouse", "courageous", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English curteis, from Old French curteis (French courtois), from cort (“court”). Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is courteous, spelled C-O-U-R-T-E-O-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.